global censorship

[Zenaan Harkness]

On Sat, Jun 11, 2016 at 03:43:49PM +1000, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
> So I try to load the following news item in TBB:
> http://www.pravdareport.com/news/hotspots/crimes/10-06-2016/134690-donbass_war-0/
> 
> It just comes up completely blank. No worries a quick "new circuit for
> this site" and ... still blank.
> 
> OK, let's search google cache. google.com redirects to google.ch. paste in
> url, search - no cache, no results, but 403 "that's an error. Your client
> does not have permission to get URL /...".
> 
> Rinse repeat, new circuit for this site, paste, search, same result 403.
> 
> Netherlands, switzerland, at this point I give up and use firefox. I just
> want to read the news article, which happens to be a little topical -
> lynch mob, but this one's in Ukraine, physical net.
> 
> Bingo, page appears.
> 
> What gives? Why so many blocks to this particular article (since, BTW, I
> loaded 4 other articles from the same website, within the same minute or
> so, and they all appeared in separate tabs in tbb no problems) ??

I guess it could also be a pretty basic nation-level network shock testing
(targetting a particular user, in this case, whether it was me or not who
knows) - as in, five URL requests come in, spread out over about half a
minute or less, perfect opportunity to stuff up the timing of replies, or
completely block some of those replies to that same website.

Did I mention I'm really dissatisifed with the current state of anonymity
software? no fill traffic, no traffic timing/ latency randomization etc
(allowing user to choose their preferences/ tolerances of course).

Middle nodes of any significant capacity may have to have relatively
restrictive windows for such things, or there might be cache size issues
to provide that randomized latency, certainly needs a bit of mathematical
theoretical analysis to determine what would make sense for Tor's concept
of middle nodes/ pure relays. Anyway, now I'm essentially rambling I
guess.